“The Return finalized at ten-forty-eight this morning.”
“And Liam is okay?” I held my breath.
There was a pause before he said: “Professor Finucane is stable. I’m told recovery will take some time.”
“He has pneumonia?” He nodded. “And typhus, I’m pretty sure—I’d be happy to fill his doctors in, if they want. Can I see him?”
“Certainly, in a few days, once you’re cleared to leave the institute.”
“He’s not here?”
“He needed more care than we could provide.” I must have looked alarmed; Dr. Ping went on: “He’ll be fine, don’t worry.” He gave his dry little laugh. “His wife is worried enough for all of us, I should think; I’m told she refuses to leave his bedside. Quite a scene, in the airlock—you were lucky to be unconscious. You know how she is, how controlled—Old British to the core. The scream she let out, when she saw him! It’s still ringing in my ears.”
Having lost my powers of speech, I gazed at Dr. Ping’s face. His eyes were so dark I could not distinguish pupil from iris, which gave him a serene aspect, furthered by his tidy little nose and perfectly level eyebrows. I waited for him to say more about Liam’s wife, but he didn’t.
“How do you know our mission was a success,” I finally asked, “if we haven’t told anyone about it yet?”
THIS WAS HOW: ABOUT TWO MONTHS INTO THE YEAR WE’D SPENT away, people had walked into libraries all over the world, or glanced into their e-book collections, surprised and pleased by the abrupt appearance of seventeen new novels by Jane Austen. As Dr. Ping calmly explained this, I stared at him with horror I did not try to hide. I’d known we’d altered the probability field, yet only then did I realize how little I’d thought through how this might work. Seventeen more books by Jane Austen was amazing in one way, terrifying in another.
For what else was different? I had returned to a world I might no longer know, one where I no longer belonged. One where Liam, it appeared, was already married. Or, had he always been married? Had he lied to me? I began to tremble.
It was a while before I could say: “So you mean to say everyone knew of this mission? And we were supposed to change—we were sent to do that, on purpose?” I wouldn’t be in trouble for altering history, then; I supposed that passed for good news, along with the seventeen books.
“Of course.” He looked at me; I saw something change in his expression. “You did not know? But perhaps, then, you come from a version that doesn’t—Let me see if—” Bringing a wrist up to his face, he spoke into his wearable. “Dr. Hernandez, Dr. Montana, if you could.” I had not noticed the device until then; I stared at it with all the fascination Jane would have shown, though a little more comprehension.
DR. HERNANDEZ, I REMEMBERED ONCE HE CAME IN AND GREETED me, was the Project Team member focused on the psychological aspects of time travel; Dr. Montana, I had never seen. They sat on either side of my bed, looking serious.
“Dr. Ping told us you seemed surprised to find your mission had altered history,” Dr. Hernandez began gently. He was a small man, perhaps sixty, with a kind, rumpled face. “Is it possible, when you set out, that you were not instructed to do so? That things were different?”
With some time to be alone and to think between the departure of Dr. Ping and the arrival of these two, I’d grown wary. “What do you mean by ‘things,’ exactly?”
“Well, that’s what we need to determine, isn’t it?” Dr. Montana asked. Their exaggeratedly gentle manner made me worry that they thought I was insane. “Tell us about the world you came from, Rachel, and we will tell you about the one you are in now. And then we will know.” She glanced at a monitor behind me. “Let me give you something to calm you. Your poor heart is racing. Don’t worry. This is a lot to take in at once.”
She was about my age, with skin the color of weathered copper and a long, slender neck. Her eyes, large and dark and thoughtful, rested on me as she took my hand and turned it over. Before I could protest she’d fished out a tiny syringe and injected something, bringing a pleasant numbness to my forearm, and soon to the rest of me. I felt my heart rate slow and my thoughts with it; my fear began to feel a long way off, like a thing that belonged to someone else. And we talked, for an hour, maybe; I’d lost all sense of time.
WE’D BEEN SENT TO TRY TO PROLONG JANE AUSTEN’S LIFE. NOT TO get the Cassandra letters; the subject never came up that day. I would later discover that not a single letter of Jane Austen’s to Cassandra had survived here, though dozens to Henry had. And my spectronanometer, useless in locating the portal marker, also had failed to capture images of those letters I’d risked so much for. Nor had anyone here known about “The Watsons”; they were surprised to find it in my bag. My diagnosis of hemochromatosis must have been prescient, my recommendation of bloodletting spot-on. Jane Austen had not died in 1817. She lived, I was astounded to learn, until 1863.
There was more, there was much more, but here was the big thing: this world I now found myself in had no hesitations about changing history. That was just how things were: sometimes confusing and wrenching but ultimately worth it. Since the invention of practical time travel—a decade sooner than in my own world—people had prevented or mitigated certain crucial disasters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, resulting in a world nicer in many ways than the one I had come from, but I did not yet understand all that either. Having solved major concerns, people could turn to smaller ones: researching the Bronze Age, say, or saving Jane Austen’s life.
“The world is constantly changing,” Dr. Hernandez summed up, spreading his hands. “That’s what it does.”
“I see.” I didn’t, though. This was more mind-boggling than when Norman Ng had first told me about the secret time travel project, years and worlds ago in the yurt in Mongolia.